Quotes from David Levithan

I was horribly bookish, to the point of coming right out and saying it, which I knew was not socially acceptable.

Breathe, we want to tell Avery. Feel yourself breathe. Because that is as much a part of your body as anything else. Avery, we whisper, you are a marvel. And he is. He may never believe it, but he is.

Later I will see there is a poem on the back of each wing. Poems that are not about us, but are about trees and teacups, fields and glances. Not about us, but about the things we hold dear. The moments we both collect by living our lives, together and alone. Rearranged alphabets, dream-remnant wonder, the seat of our love.

buoyed not by thrill but by happiness.

Rip never dates anyone," she observes. "Why?" I ask. "He doesn't like the odds.

The truth. Really the Truth.

Prayer or not, I want to believe that, despite all eveidence to the contrary, it is possible for anyone to find that one special person. That person to spend Christmas with or grow old with or just take a nice silly walk in Central Park with. Somebody who wouldn't judge another for the prepositions they dangle, or their run-on sentences, who in turn wouldn't be judged for the snobbery of their language etymology inclinations.

The kiss I like the most is one of the slow ones. It's as much breath as touch, as much no as yes. You lean in from the side, and I have to turn a little to make it happen.

One of the towers has fallen. When it's our turn to leave, it's like something in me is finally willing to listen, and suddenly I understand what it means. The tower doesn't exist anymore. Something I've seen my entire life - something so much larger than my entire life - is gone. That is my first reaction. And then I think about all the people inside. There must have been people inside.

As long as we can conjure, who needs anything else? As long as we can agree on the magical lie and be happy, what more is there to ask for?

Belief. That's what I want for Christmas. Look it up. Maybe there's more meaning there than I understand. Maybe you could explain it to me?

As a kid he wished for money or fame or toys or friends. More recent wishes were for so many other things, all of them synonymous with love or escape.

I'm not Justin. Even if she doesn't know it.

At one point they'd repeated everything enough, and I wanted to tell them to stop showing the planes hitting the tower. We didn't need to see it again. And yet I didn't turn it off. Because I was hanging on every minute, wanting to be there when whatever was going to happen next actually happened.

When no one else is around, we open ourselves to the quieter astonishments that enormity can offer.

Maybe language is kind, giving us these double meanings. Maybe it's trying to teach us a lesson, that we can always be two things at once.

i worry about you and i tell him don't and he says that's exactly why

Bur I guess the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead.

But as i've told him a million times, when it comes to true dancing, it doesn't matter what you look like-it's all about the joy you feel.

And still, for all the jealousy, all the doubt, sometimes I will be struck with a kind of awe that we're together.

Answerless questions can destroy you.

Once you experience enormity, it lingers everywhere you look, and wants to be every world you say.

I love the idea that an abuse can be negated. And that the things most often disabused are notions.

Because I have this theory that when we die, every animal that we've eaten has a chance at eating us back. So if you're a carnivore and you add up all the animals you've eaten—well, that's a long time in purgatory, being chewed.